The City of Detroit Withheld Water From 40,000 People–So Activists Tapped the Mayor’s Mansion

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'[City officials] are selling this narrative that Detroiters are sitting in their homes with big screen TVs and refusing to pay their water bills. This is just not true. ... These people are living in complete poverty.'

On the morning of August 3, volunteers from the Michigan and Detroit Coalitions Against Tar Sands (MICATS/DCATS) gathered at Detroit’s Manoogian Mansion, wearing shirts that read “Water Is Life” and carrying large, empty jugs.

The 4,000-square-foot residence on the Detroit River is the home of Mayor Mike Duggan. The volunteers were there with a simple goal: Force the mayor to share his water with the some 40,000 Detroit residents whose water has been shut off in the past year because they can’t pay their bills.

Because the mansion is city-owned, they reasoned, Detroiters lacking access to water in their own homes should be able to share in its resources. So activists attached hoses to the water taps on the side of the mansion and began to fill up their jugs, taking about 12 gallons in what they hoped would be a wake-up call to the city.

“Denying tens of thousands of people the right to water ought to be criminal; doing it while living in a city-owned mansion is just despicable,” said organizer Valerie Jean Blakely.

Detroit’s water wars are connected to the larger fight over controversial reforms implemented in the wake of the city’s 2013 bankruptcy. In addition to slashing pensions and privatizing several key municipal services, the city’s bankruptcy plan handed control of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) to a new regional authority run by unelected officials. As part of this reorganization, DWSD has intensified efforts to collect debts, announcing in March 2014 that it would shut off water services to 1,500 to 3,000 customers each week if their bills remained unpaid.

Corruption, bad investments and a shrinking customer base have contributed to DWSD’s growing deficit, which stands at $22 million, according to officials. The department has repeatedly raised rates in an attempt to pay off its debts, hitting residents with an 8.7 percent rate increase for water and sewage in June 2014, followed one year later by a 7.5 percent rate hike. Prior to these hikes, the average monthly water bill in Detroit for a family of four was already nearly double the national average.

Environmental organizers say that while Detroit’s citizens suffer through a manmade drought, public resources are flowing freely to corporations. Detroit businesses such as the Chrysler Group collectively owe more than $20 million in back payments to the water department, but their taps have not been turned off. And Detroit’s Marathon Refinery received $175 million in tax breaks from the city for an expansion of its operations, including the water-intensive process of refining Canadian tar sands oil.

MICATS and DCATS are among dozens of other groups that have sprung up to protest the wave of water shutoffs threatening Detroit’s most vulnerable residents.

DeMeeko Williams, co-founder of the Detroit Water Brigade (DWB), a nonprofit dedicated to providing water access, says the shutoffs are having another devastating effect: They’re exacerbating the city’s foreclosure crisis. Many residents have racked up thousands of dollars in back payments they must meet in order to get their water turned back on. Some take that money out of their rent or mortgage payments. That, in turn, makes them vulnerable to losing their homes to foreclosure, or if they can’t afford upkeep, to condemnation.

So volunteers are taking matters into their own hands. “We couldn’t let the city go without water,” says Williams. The DWB has helped thousands of residents access water through a number of innovative schemes. In addition to the relief stations, it has solicited water donations for those in need, distributed barrels to collect rainwater, and helped create a water affordability fund, which covers 10 percent of residents’ past-due bills using private donations.

Blakely narrowly escaped having her own water turned off. During a tough winter, her family fell more than $1,000 behind on utility bills. At 7 a.m. on July 14, 2014, a truck operated by Homrich—a private contractor that has been paid as much as $6 million by the city to conduct water shutoffs—drove through her neighborhood and turned off water access in most of the area’s homes. Fortunately, Blakely was awake, and stood on the water access point on her lawn until the truck driver gave up and continued on.

That morning, Blakely got friends and volunteers together to provide water, food and sanitation kits to people in need. After the first week of providing these goods to her neighbors, Blakely says, she felt empowered. After the second week, she felt despair. “Even if you gave someone two gallons of water, they would be making serious life decisions with what to do with the water,” Blakely says. “They have to decide if they want to cook, bathe their kids or wash their hands.”

Blakely and other activists see their work as a stopgap measure until the city begins taking care of its poor. She’s scornful of rhetoric from Mayor Duggan such as, “When some Detroit residents don’t pay their bills, those bills have to be paid by other Detroiters.”

She adds that city officials “are selling this narrative that Detroiters are sitting in their homes with big screen TVs and refusing to pay their water bills. This is just not true,” she says. “I can tell you that these people are living in complete poverty.”

The shutoffs have drawn a rebuke from the United Nations, which says that they are a violation of the basic human right: access to clean drinking water.

In October 2014, Leilani Farha, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, made a statement urging Detroit’s elected officials to take action: “Every effort should be made by all levels of government to ensure that the most vulnerable are not evicted from or lose their housing as a result of water shutoffs or water bill arrears.”

Thus far, the city hasn’t budged. Though it has thrice implemented brief moratoriums and taken measures such as increasing staffing at the DWSD call center, improving customer notifications of impending shutoffs and creating payment plans intended to help customers stay current on the bills, activists say these amount to little more than a Band-Aid. City Council President Brenda Jones did not respond to In These Times’s request for comment.

So MICATS and DCATS are using direct action to raise a ruckus.

Blakely says of tapping the mayor’s mansion, “It really was a liberation. It might not have been a lot of water but it was in your face. We made a statement.”

Lauren Gaynor is a Summer 2015 In These Times editorial intern. She is a senior English and Professional Writing major at Michigan State University and enjoys theater, music and everything that Chicago has to offer.

What profits? Read the article again, the agency has a $22 million dollar deficit.

Posted by LincolnTony on 2016-01-23 12:19:55

Why does everyone miss the part about the private corporation that keeps raising rates to generate profits over and above any other city in the nation?

Posted by poonchkie on 2015-09-30 02:07:44

They have a private corporation that charges exorbitant rates, higher than anywhere else in the nation and you are okay with this? Because it will be happening to you then you'll be whining a different tune.

Posted by poonchkie on 2015-09-30 02:06:15

Downsize - live simple.Pay bills, everyone does it.

Posted by WilliH2O on 2015-09-29 14:56:45

Look, Williwater, your compassion is touching. But these people did not DECIDE to quit paying, as if WATER is something someone else would welsh on just because you would... They deserve water, more than food, even - for without water we die quickly. This is what happens when you can actually work 60 hrs per week and STILL have no money for rent, utilities and transportation. Your concern is touching. When are you getting that heart implant?

Posted by Betty J Rousey on 2015-09-29 09:34:57

Can you explain what our taxes are for?? Ask yourself about the amount of money we in-voluntarily spend for foreign aid that does nothing for our people

Posted by William Bednarz on 2015-09-14 10:55:06

Where do you put a rain barrel when you live on the 3rd floor of an apartment and do not have access to the downspouts to collect rainwater?

Posted by old_redneck on 2015-09-13 23:11:01

How do you explain the fact that Chrysler is $20 MILLION in arrears? Or did you conveniently overlook that part?

Posted by old_redneck on 2015-09-13 23:09:22

rather than protest, why not pay their water bill? the protestors look like white, middle class; they can afford to pay for the poor's water bill.

I simply DO NOT believe you. The bill CAN be paid, if people made a real choice to pay it. Prioritize bills, use a Rain Barrel for toilet flushing, and it becomes very possible to pay that monthly water charge. Too many are lazy whiners, unwilling to help themselves.

Posted by WilliH2O on 2015-09-12 22:35:52

Nope. No love for residential thieves.

Posted by WilliH2O on 2015-09-12 22:30:36

You blame people but not the corporations who survive by corporate welfare - End the welfare and the tax breaks THEN TALK

Posted by William Bednarz on 2015-09-12 13:24:51

If you don't have $2 a day, what do you do? If cost of living were figured into the minimum wage, they could pay their bills.

Posted by mamasnothappy1 on 2015-09-12 11:24:22

This is just the beginning. Many Texas towns already have to have water shipped since they have NONE! Where will we have to go to get water and how will we pay for it when it takes all your income to just bathe once a week and have drinking water? And when the Keystone Pipeline breaks infiltrate our drinking water, how will we grow food and care for our animals?

Posted by mamasnothappy1 on 2015-09-12 11:18:56

Check if its a StormWater Bill versus a fresh drinking water bill before you spout nonsense, okay ?

Posted by WilliH2O on 2015-09-10 22:39:54

Now you can save 100% off of your cable bill. Download KODI, and then TVAddOns. Then you get streaming everything for free. It's legal too, that's why the boxes are sold everywhere, including in WalMart and Target.

Posted by Kevin Schmidt on 2015-09-10 12:18:33

So then you are all for shutting off the water to Detroit businesses like Chrysler, taking them over, and selling off their assets to pay for the $20,000,000 water bill that they made a conscious choice to not pay.Thanks!

Posted by Kevin Schmidt on 2015-09-10 12:16:10

A professional electrician I can assure you that electric power is also better delivered from a publicly owned utility. In the late California Power Crisis (manufactured by Ken Lay & Co.) it was only the Los Angeles Public Power District which both maintained services and did not drastically increase prices throughout the whole silly caper.

Posted by Chris Herz on 2015-09-09 23:04:48

The public utilities have been privatized and guess what? That wonderful FREE MARKET that was supposed to make things cheaper because of 'competition and efficiencies' ACTUALLY increased the prices DRAMATICALLY.....Remember what happened to Stockton CA and Jefferson AL, where the bond fees were fixed by the big guys on Wall Street in order to bring NEOLIBERALISM to the US and to impoverish us.... There was NO CRISIS, there was only the CORRUPTION and PRICE FIXING and COLLUSION that increased the prices....and this is EXACTLY the reason that these utilities should be nationalized or state owned versus privtatized..... IF WE ACTUALLY HAD A FREE MARKET, it would save you at least 70% of your cable bill.

Posted by madame de farge on 2015-09-09 16:03:54

Water is cheap, approximately $2.00 per day -- People neglected, made a conscious choice, to NOT PAY the water bill. They knew it was not free, but took it anyways, basically outright theft of the product. It is a product; manufactured; distributed; regulated; and it requires payment , every month.